The smugglers left Havana in broad daylight, slipping beyond the harbour wall and over the Florida Straits. They evaded the US Coast Guard and flew unnoticed through heavily guarded airspace to land in Florida with their contraband: six Cohiba cigars.

It helped that they were pigeons.

The mastermind of this daring, though not terribly profitable, criminal enterprise was Duke Riley, a Brooklyn artist whose exhibits have occasionally provoked a critical response from the authorities.

In 2007 he was intercepted by police after floating towards the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship in a wooden submarine modelled on the craft deployed by American